Leonardo Bruni, Whetherthe Literate and the Mob Spoke the Same Way in the Times of Terence and Cicero
Let the question be then whether the common people in Rome through the times of the poet Terence and of Cicero spoke as those whom we now say speak in good, literate Latin, or whether there was one type of speech among the common people and another among the literate.
Your first and indeed strongest argument is that orators in the senate, in court, and in meetings delivered their speeches in Latin, which they would not have done if they were not understood by everyone.
Further, the comedies of Terence and Plautus were recited to the people in the very same language in which they were written, and you say that this indicates that the common people spoke in the same way. For who could they delight if they were not understood?
These seem to you to be the firmest proofs and most certain arguments for your opinion. I, however, don’t think that they are any greater proofs than the fact that the Gospel and the solemn rites of the Mass are delivered in literate Latin before a crowd of listeners.
Indeed, people understand this stuff even if they are illiterate, yet they themselves nevertheless do not speak thus, nor do they know how to speak thus (though they understand), precisely because it is far easier to understand foreign speech than to produce it.
Therefore, let us brush aside your arguments if you please.
Sit igitur quaestio utrum Romae per Terentii poetae et M. Tullii tempora vulgus ita loquebatur ut loquuntur hi quos nunc latine litterateque loqui dicimus, vel alius fuerit vulgi sermo, alius litteratorum.
Tua quidem prima ac potissima ratio est quod oratores in senatu iudiciisque et concionibus latine orabant, quod non fecissent nisi a cunctis intelligerentur.
Praeterea Terentii Plautique comoediae recitabantur ad populum ea ipsa lingua qua scriptae sunt, idque signum esse ais quod eodem modo vulgus loquebatur. Quomodo enim delectarent nisi intelligerentur?
Hae tibi firmissimae probationes videntur ac certissima argumenta opinionis tuae. Ego autem non maiora ista puto quam nunc sint Evangelia Missarumque solemnia latine ac litterate in audientium turba pronunciari.
Intelligunt enim homines, licet inlitterati sint, nec tamen ipsi ita loquuntur nec illo modo loqui scirent, licet intelligant, propterea quod longe facilius est intelligere alienum sermonem quam proferre.
Discutiamus igitur, si placet, argumenta tua, et quid valeant videamus.
“I congratulate you not so much as a brave person but as if you had won the consulship or a praetorship: you have leveled up in honor! Similarly I would say to a good person if no misfortune had given them the change to demonstrate their spirit’s strength, “I think you’re unlucky because you have never been unlucky. You have made it through life without a nemesis. No one will know what you’re capable of, not even you!”
For someone to really know themselves, they need to be tested. No one discovers what they can do without trying! This is why some people have intentionally given themselves to misfortune and have searched for some way to make their true value shine bright when it might instead pass into the unknown.
Great men, I say, often delight in facing trouble, as brave soldiers do when they face war. I once heard a gladiator named Triumphus in the reign of Tiberius Caesar complaining about how few competitions there were: “How beautiful an age has slipped away!”
Non gratulor tamquam viro forti, sed tanquam consulatum praeturamve adepto; honore auctus es. Item dicere et bono viro possum, si illi nullam occasionem difficilior casus dedit in qua una1 vim animi sui ostenderet: “Miserum te iudico, quod numquam fuisti miser. Transisti sine adversario vitam; nemo sciet quid potueris, ne tu quidem ipse.” Opus est enim ad notitiam sui experimento; quid quisque posset nisi temptando non didicit. Itaque quidam ipsi ultro se cessantibus malis obtulerunt et virtuti iturae in obscurum occasionem per quam 4enitesceretquaesierunt. Gaudent, inquam, magni viri aliquando rebus adversis, non aliter quam fortes milites bello. Triumphum ego murmillonem sub Tib. Caesare de raritate munerum audivi querentem: “Quam bella,” inquit, “aetas perit!”
Gnomologium Vaticanum, 518
“Sophokles the tragic poet, after he heard that Euripides died in Macedonia, said “The whetstone of my poetry is gone.”
“But, truly, the knowledge of many disciplines is pleasurable”. Ok, then, let’s keep only what is necessary from these arts. Do you think that the person who considers superficial matters equal to useful ones and for this reason makes his home a museum of expensive products is reprehensible but not the man who is obsessed with the superfluous aspects of academia? To want to know more than is enough is a kind of excessive delusion.
Why? Well, this extreme pursuit of the liberal arts makes people annoying, wordy, bad-mannered, and overly self-satisfied, even though they have not learned the basics because they pursue the useless.
The scholar Didymus wrote four thousand books. I would pity him if had only read that many useless works. In these books he searched for Homer’s homeland, the real mother of Aeneas, whether Anacreon is more licentious or just drunk, whether Sappho was promiscuous and other various questions which, if you learned them, would have been necessarily forgotten. Go on, don’t say life is long. No, when you turn to your own people too, I will show you many things which should be pruned back with an ax.”
“At enim delectat artium notitia multarum.” Tantum itaque ex illis retineamus, quantum necessarium est. An tu existimas reprendendum, qui supervacua usibus conparat et pretiosarum rerum pompam in domo explicat, non putas eum, qui occupatus est in supervacua litterarum supellectile? Plus scire velle quam sit satis, intemperantiae genus est.
Quid? Quod ista liberalium artium consectatio molestos, verbosos, intempestivos, sibi placentes facit et ideo non discentes necessaria, quia supervacua didicerunt. Quattuor milia librorum Didymus grammaticus scripsit. Misererer, si tam multa supervacua legisset. In his libris de patria Homeri quaeritur, in his de Aeneae matre vera, in his libidinosior Anacreon an ebriosior vixerit, in his an Sappho publica fuerit, et alia, quae erant dediscenda, si scires. I nunc et longam esse vitam nega. Sed ad nostros quoque cum perveneris, ostendam multa securibus recidenda.
These are themes close to the old man’s heart, elsewhere too:
Seneca, De Brevitate Vitae 13
“This sickness used to just afflict the Greeks, to discover the number of oars Odysseus possessed, whether the Iliad was written before the Odyssey, whether the poems belong to the same author, and other matters like this which, if you keep them to yourself, cannot please your private mind; but if you publish them, you seem less learned than annoying.”
Graecorum iste morbus fuit quaerere, quem numerum Ulixes remigum habuisset, prior scripta esset Ilias an Odyssia, praeterea an eiusdem essent auctoris, alia deinceps huius notae, quae sive contineas, nihil tacitam conscientiam iuvant sive proferas, non doctior videaris sed molestior.
Seneca, Moral Epistle 108
“But some error comes thanks to our teachers who instruct us how to argue but not how to live; some error too comes from students, who bring themselves to teachers not for the nourishing of the soul, but the cultivation of our wit. Thus what was philosophy has been turned into philology.”
Sed aliquid praecipientium vitio peccatur, qui nos docent disputare, non vivere, aliquid discentium, qui propositum adferunt ad praeceptores suos non animum excolendi, sed ingenium. Itaque quae philosophia fuit, facta philologia est.
ca. 1350 | The Morgan Library & Museum
J.E. Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship (Ausonius)
“It is difficult to imagine that a man capable of writing such trifles as these (not to mention his lines on the Caesars and on celebrated cities) had some ten years previously (in 378 a.d.) filled the splendid position of praetorian praefect of the provinces of Gaul (an official whose sway extended even over Spain and the opposite coast of Africa, and over the southern part of Britain), and, in the four years between 376 and 380, had seen his father honorary praefect of lllyricum, his son and son-in-law proconsuls of Africa, and his nephew praefect of Rome. It seems as if, on his return to the scenes of his early work as a professor at Bordeaux, the praefect relapsed into the ‘ grammarian ‘, spending his time on learned trifles, which are among the least important products of scholarship, and consoling himself in his tedious task by recalling Virgil’s famous phrase: — ‘in tenui labor, at tenuis non gloria’. We may regret that Ausonius does not appear to have used his great opportunities for reforming the educational system which prevailed in the schools of the Western Empire, and thus rendering a lasting service to the cause of learning; but we may allow him the credit of having possibly inspired the memorable decree promulgated by Gratian in 376, which improved the status of public instructors by providing for the appointment of teachers of rhetoric and of Greek and Latin ‘ grammar ‘ in the principal cities of Gaul, and fixing the amount of their stipends ‘. “
Once communal latrines were established in the Hellenistic period, the risk of exposure to social gaze while sitting with one’s anachronistic pants down was more acute, albeit the experience perhaps more sanitary.
However, at least in Ephesus in the fourth century AD you may have had the pleasure of the following humorous poem to read in a latrine next to the Baths of Constantine, wishing you a satisfying unburdenment in a Homeric-style which is comically at odds with the wholly-un-Homeric subject matter (Ephesos 2104 [= IEph 456.1]):
Kicking afoot and raising fists ahand
And coughing your heart out and shaking your whole body
Take full pleasure in shitting your brains out, and may your stomach
Never give you pain whenever you come to my house.
“Ligurra, you fear that I might compose
Verses against you, a brief, intense poem—
Oh how you long to seem worthy of this fear.
But you fear in vain, in vain you long.
The Libyan lions growl at bulls;
They do not pester butterflies.
I will advise you—if you are in pain to be read,
Find a drunk alley poet who writes
with broken coal or dusty chalk
the poems people read while shitting.
This face of yours can’t be known by my touch.”
Versus et breve vividumque carmen
in te ne faciam times, Ligurra,
et dignus cupis hoc metu videri.
sed frustra metuis cupisque frustra.
in tauros Libyci fremunt leones,
non sunt papilionibus molesti.
quaeras censeo, si legi laboras,
nigri fornicis ebrium poetam,
qui carbone rudi putrique creta
scribit carmina quae legunt cacantes.
frons haec stigmate non meo notanda est
Amy Coker has a PhD in Classics from the University of Manchester, UK. She taught and held research positions in University-land for the best part of a decade after her PhD, before jumping ship to school teaching (11-18 year olds) in 2018. She still manages to find time to think and write about Ancient Greek offensive words, pragmatics, and historical linguistics. She can be found on Twitter at @AECoker.
“You should know that while Homer and many other authors say that the only child of Achilles and Deidameia was Neoptolemos, Demetrios of Ilion records that here were two, Oneiros [“dream”] and Neoptolemos.
They say that Orestes killed him in Phôkis accidentally and when he recognized that he did, he built him a tomb near Daulis. He dedicated the sword he killed him with there and then went to the “White Island”, which Lykophron calls the “foaming cliff”, and propitiated Achilles.”
BNJ 59 F 1b Ptolemy Chennos, Novel History, Book 3 = Photios, Bibliotheca 190, 148b21
“And [he says] that there were two children of Achilles and Deidamia, Neoptolemos and Oneiros. Oneiros was killed accidentally by Orestes in Phôkis while they fighting over erecting a tent.”
“Even if some god should permit that I would return to the time of my birth from this age, I would sternly refuse–for, truly, I do not wish to restart as if to retrace a race run from the finish line to the starting post.
What attraction does life have? Or, rather, what labor does it lack? Let it have clear charm–even still, it must have either satiety or a conclusion. It is not my purpose to deplore life as many–even learned men–have often done. And I do not regret that I have lived, because I lived in a such a way that I do not believe I was pointlessly born. And I am leaving life as if from an inn, not a home. For nature has given us a way-station for a brief delay, not to permanently reside.”
Et si quis deus mihi largiatur ut ex hac aetate repuerascam et in cunis vagiam, valde recusem, nec vero velim quasi decurso spatio ad carceres a calce revocari. Quid habet enim vita commodi? Quid non potius laboris? Sed habeat sane; habet certe tamen aut satietatem aut modum. Non libet enim mihi deplorare vitam, quod multi et ei docti saepe fecerunt, neque me vixisse paenitet, quoniam ita vixi, ut non frustra me natum existimem, et ex vita ita discedo tamquam ex hospitio, non tamquam e domo; commorandi enim natura divorsorium nobis, non habitandi dedit.
This last bit made me think of Lucretius:
De Rerum Natura, 3.970-971
“Thus one thing never ceases to arise from another,
and life is given to no one for ownership, but to all for rent.”
sic aliud ex alio numquam desistet oriri
vitaque mancipio nulli datur, omnibus usu
“For the sake of Zeus, allow me to interrogate the tragedians and the storytellers who came before them as to what they had in mind when they pour so great an ignorance on Laios’ son who joined that terrible journey with his mother and on Telephos who, although he did not pursue sex, also laid next to the one who bore him and would have done the same things if a serpent had not interrupted him by divine command. How can these things happen when nature even allows the mindless animals to recognize the nature of this union from simple touch—they do not need special signs or anything from the man who exposed Oedipus on Mt. Cithairon.
The camel, indeed, would certainly never have sex with its own mother. There was a herdsman, who tried to force this, and, by covering up a female as much as possible and hiding all of her except for her genitals, drove the child to its mother. The ignorant animal, thanks to its excitement for sex, did the deed and then understood it. While biting and trampling the man who was responsible for this unnatural union, it killed him terribly by kneeling on top of him. Then it threw him off a cliff.
In this, Oedipus was ignorant in failing to kill himself and just putting out is eyes: for, he did not know that it was possible to escape his troubles by getting rid of himself and not curing his home and family, and as such to try to cure evils which had passed with an incurable evil.”
Is there any way I can prove myself to you beyond the work I have put in to your Greek epigrams, which I have tried to match in Latin translation? It’s still a turn for the worse: the cause is the weakness of my own genius followed by the inadequacy of what Lucretius calls the “poverty of our country’s language.” But, if these Latin translations of mine seem to you to possess any bit of charm, then you know how much pleasure I have in the originals you made in Greek. Farewell.”
Plinius Arrio Antonino Suo S.
Quemadmodum magis adprobare tibi possum, quanto opere mirer epigrammata tua Graeca, quam quod quaedam Latine aemulari et exprimere temptavi? in deterius tamen. Accidit hoc primum imbecillitate ingenii mei, deinde inopia ac potius, ut Lucretius ait, egestate patrii sermonis. Quodsi haec, quae sunt et Latina et mea, habere tibi aliquid venustatis videbuntur, quantum putas inesse iis gratiae, quae et a te et Graece proferuntur! Vale.
In one topics for “Table-Talk”, Plutarch suggests the effects of love on a poet as a starting point…Of course, if you want debates about Love, the Symposia of Plato and Xenophon are good inspirations too…
Plutarch: “Table-Talk” Moralia 622 Why Do We Say that Eros Teaches a Poet?
“The question “how it can be said truthful that “Love teaches the poet” even though he was songless before, was considered at Sossius’ house after some Sapphic verses were performed. Philoxenos claims that the Kyklops “cured love with well-voiced songs.”
Love is said to be clever at every kind of audacity and at furnishing ingenuity, just as Plato calls love “speedy” and “prepared for everything”. Indeed, love makes a quiet man talkative and the withdrawn man solicitous; it makes the carefree and easygoing person serious and sedulous. And what is especially wondrous, a cheap and miserly man, after he falls in love, becomes soft, compliant, and persuadable just as iron in fire. Thus what seems like a joke is not completely absurd in the proverb “a lover’s purse is locked by an onion leaf”.
It has also been said that being in love is like being drunk. For it makes people hot, happy, and troubled–after they come into this state, they fall into speech that sounds like songs or verse. People claim Aeschylus wrote his tragedies while drinking, even completely drunk. My grandfather Lamprias was himself most innovative and insightful when he was drinking. He was in the habit of saying that just as with incense, he too was activated by warmth.
In addition, people see the ones they want most sweetly—and are no less moved to praise them than to see them. In praise, love, voluble in everything, is the most effusive. When people are in love they want to persuade everyone how beautiful and good are the ones they love, because they believe it themselves.”
